The Second Coming of South Park

South Park, one of the most self-consciously juvenile television shows of all time,is almost old enough to drink. Now airing its 20th season, with the 20th anniversary of the series premiere ("Cartman Gets an Anal Probe") arriving in August of 2017, the show has nothing left to prove, and seems to have already achieved its ultimate, secret purpose: vaulting creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker to genuine stardom in the surprising field of musical theater.

Which makes it an interesting time for the show to have a renaissance of sorts. Even at its sharpest, South Park won't enjoy the level of influence it had in its less mature days; it's never going to be "relevant" or "important" again, but that's probably for the best. Many of the series' worst moments have stemmed from a heightened sense of moral superiority masquerading as cynical detachment, a commitment to the idea that everyone with skin in the game is an idiot rather than just a person fumbling around trying to do the right thing. Now, though, South Park has cooled its directionless rage into laser-focused, frustrated bemusement.

Parker and Stone began transforming the show about five seasons ago, gradually adding something South Park had never needed before: a sense of continuity.

The show certainly has dense iconography. Earlier this month at New York Comic-Con, fans gathered just to sit inside replicas of moments pulled from the show's history, ranging from Eric Cartman feeding Scott Tenorman his parents in a bowl of chili to Lemmiwinks the gerbil crawling through Mr. Slave's ass to Randy Marsh's bloated, microwaved testicles. (This was apparently by far the most popular part of the exhibit.) But South Park's current commitment to its internal history is a relatively recent development, stemming from the Season 15 episode "You're Getting Old," in which Stan experiences crushing depression that doesn't go away by the end of the episode.

South Park had carried over the occasional plotline (like the season Kenny died and stayed dead), but the past few seasons saw increasing levels of continuity, culminating in last season, which told a full story: a gang of caricatured frat bros and their leader, PC Principal, enforced their understanding of political correctness on the town.

PC Principal and his bros appeared at first to allow Parker and Stone to spin a heavy-handed parable about free speech–essentially what you would expect from emotionally stunted libertarians, or the people who used to be called "South Park Republicans." But it turned out PC Principal was himself a pawn, a front for advertisers who can use a softened version of social justice language to sell obscenely marked-up real estate and lifestyle products. It's a surprisingly subtle, incisive argument coming from a series where people frequently shit themselves to death.

At the beginning of this season, PC Principal is still the principal of South Park Elementary, and the show has dived headfirst into the election, casting Mr. Garrison (formerly Mrs. Garrison, formerly Mr. Garrison) in the role of the bigoted and hateful (but ultimately scared and ignorant) Donald Trump, trying his best to lose the election to an oblivious Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, Gerald Broflovski finds himself at the center of a vast conspiracy when he becomes an internet troll and bullies a Danish athlete into committing suicide. Meanwhile, Butters incites a proto-MRA movement loosely based on Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protests.

Maybe South Park isn't best understood as a TV show anymore: It's more like a comic strip, the equivalent of The Boondocks or Doonesbury but with an active, engaged fan base.

This isn't a turn South Park could have taken until now. The characters have become a potent blend of deeply established and highly mutable—when Kyle drops his pants and joins Butters' crew, it's slightly out of character, but still within the sandbox Parker and Stone have created for themselves. Randy's opposition to Garrison and later begrudging admission that his boorish honesty is, in some sense, appealing, is spot-on without having to take Randy into full idiot mode. So maybe South Park isn't best understood as a TV show anymore: It's more like a comic strip, the equivalent of The Boondocks or Doonesbury but with an active, engaged fan base.

Perhaps more importantly, South Park just needed to find its ultimate target, the technology that rendered comic strips irrelevant: the internet. PC Principal's version of politically correct stems largely from leftist online circles and easily memeable phrases like checking someone's privilege, while this season takes on message board trolling. After Gerald Broflovski accidentally trolls a Danish athlete into committing suicide, the entire Scandinavian country bands together to create an instant-doxxing website in an attempt to remove all semblance of privacy. Though this season could be holding its ideological cards close to the vest and withholding its final opinion of trolling and appropriate online conduct, it's worth noting that South Park Republicans are one of several forerunners for the alt-right.

The danger that early-period South Park politics has managed to freshly avoid by committing to a form of linearity is to fall into a sort of facile relativism–to think that "here are no right or wrong answers." There might not be any 100% correct answers to political questions, but keeping yourself in the game forces you to admit that, while every viewpoint is flawed in some respects, some are better than others. At age 20, even South Park is old enough to admit that.

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